Dionysiaca

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discussed in biography

His chief work is the
Dionysiaca, a hexameter poem in 48 books; its main subject, submerged in a chaos of by-episodes, is the expedition of the god Dionysus to India. Nonnus’ fertile inventiveness and felicitous descriptive fantasy, which are well served by a unique command of the language and his vast literary knowledge, made him the often-imitated leader of the last Greek epic school....

Greek literature

...the sense of appropriateness of form to content was lost. An example is the transitional work of Nonnus, a 5th-century Egyptian-born Greek who eventually converted to Christianity. His long poem
Dionysiaca was composed in Homeric language and metre, but it reads as an extended panegyric on Dionysus rather than as an epic. Nonnus is plausibly credited with a paraphrase, in similar metre...